Page 5

Arlo

Getting Orion from containment to my house should take less than ten minutes. It takes nearly twenty because half the guard detail trails us at rifle distance and several hundred pounds of bear keeps watching my breathing like I’m the only thing standing between him and another cage. My ribs grind whenever I step wrong. I’ve gotten pretty good at hiding pain over the last three years, but Orion catches every shortened breath anyway, his head turning the second my stride changes.

A questioning vibration rolls out of his chest and into the gravel under my boots. When I glance over, amber eyes are already fixed on me, his ears tipped forward despite the three darts still buried in his flank. “I’m fine,” I tell him, which is technically true if the standard is still upright and not actively bleeding to death. His stare doesn’t move, so I add, “Fine enough to walk.”

He blows a hard breath through his nose and stays beside me. I brush two fingers over the place he bit in the cage, more acknowledgment than reassurance, and the weak bond gives me a muddy wash of pain, exhaustion, and the constant awareness of the men behind us. Orion doesn’t understand why I’m letting them follow. I’m not sure I do either, beyond the fact that turning around to threaten six armed guards while escorting a drugged bear through the compound seems like a good way to end this trip with more bodies on the ground.

At least containment taught the guards something. Nobody crowds him now. Boots scrape well behind us, the formation loose enough to pretend they aren’t afraid while every rifle stays where Orion can see it. Whenever one of them drifts closer, Orion checks the movement, then checks me, waiting to see whether my shoulders tighten or I keep walking. Somewhere between the cage and here, he decided my body is a better warning system than anything Wolfscorge has taught him.

“You don’t have to take every cue from me,” I murmur as the scanner outside the residential block comes into view. One ear turns toward my voice while the rest of him remains aimed at the checkpoint. “My judgment isn’t exactly spotless.”

A young guard I don’t recognize steps away from the post. His gaze jumps from me to Orion and sticks for a moment on the blood dried down the front of my shirt. “Maddox, hold up. We need to clear you before you take him into residential.”

“Then clear me.” I stop, and Orion stops with me, close enough that the heat coming off his shoulder reaches my arm.

The guard hesitates. He looks at Orion, decides against getting anywhere near him, and reaches for me instead. His fingers close around my upper arm.

Orion hits him before I understand what I’m seeing. One second there’s a hand on me, the next the guard is flat on his back with the air knocked out of him and Orion coming down on top of him hard enough to spray gravel. One paw pins the man across the chest while the other rips through his uniform, claws opening the skin beneath it. His scream breaks apart as blood spreads under brown fur and the checkpoint fills with the sharp, sour stink of fear.

Orion closes his jaws around the guard’s shoulder but doesn’t go for his throat. The distinction does absolutely nothing for my stomach. There are no words in the bond, only the brutal certainty underneath what he’s doing: the man put his hands on me, and somewhere inside Orion that made him a threat worth tearing apart. My own Alpha answers with a low pulse of satisfaction before I can stop it, hot and ugly enough that nausea rolls through me.

“Orion, look at me.”

His head jerks up. Blood darkens the fur around his muzzle, his teeth still buried in the guard’s shoulder when safeties snap off behind me.

“Back away from him!”

Red dots spread over Orion’s chest and neck. He shifts more of his weight over the man beneath him, claws sinking deeper while his attention moves from one rifle to the next. The medics haven’t even reached their injured guard, but half the checkpoint already looks ready to shoot Orion and call the whole thing procedure afterward. If one of them fires, I know exactly what happens next. Orion goes through whoever is closest, and the rest of them open up until there’s nothing left to stop.

I step into their line despite the hot pull through my ribs. “Look at me.” Orion’s eyes cut to mine, drag back toward the rifles, then return when I hold his stare. “He’s down. Let him go.”

His jaws loosen a little at a time. The growl stays buried in his chest while he hangs between the guns and my voice, every muscle still ready to finish what he started. He isn’t standing down because the guards told him to. He’s doing it because I asked, which I didn’t expect after what I did to him in that cage, and I’m not stupid enough to waste the opening.

I let my pheromones roll outward just far enough to make the youngest guard stumble. Several rifles dip before their owners fight the command and drag them back up. “Lower them.”

“He disemboweled a man, Maddox!” the senior guard snaps. Sweat shines across his forehead despite the cold. “That thing is out of control.”

“He’s an Omega, and your man grabbed me without warning while Orion was drugged, injured, and surrounded by rifles.” I keep myself between the guns and the bear, close enough now that I can smell fresh blood underneath the chemical sting of the darts. “You want to argue about whether he went too far, do it after your guard stops bleeding. Right now, lower the weapons before Orion decides the rest of you are part of the same threat.”

The senior guard looks past me. Orion is still standing over the injured man with blood on his claws and every ounce of his attention fixed on the rifles. For once, nobody needs a report to explain the obvious. The guard’s jaw works before he signals the medics forward, and even then they hesitate until I look back at Orion.

“Let them take him.”

Orion doesn’t move at first. The medics stay frozen several feet away, waiting with the kind of rigid patience people use around an animal they expect to turn on them. Eventually one paw lifts, then the other, and Orion steps aside with his ears pinned while they drag the guard clear. A dark smear follows the man across the gravel. Orion watches until the medics are out of reach, then comes straight back to me and plants himself close enough that coarse fur brushes my arm.

The senior guard gives me a look that promises paperwork at minimum and retaliation if he can find a cleaner way to manage it. “Ten feet,” I tell him before he gets the chance to speak. “Nobody touches me, nobody touches Orion, and nobody gets clever with a rifle unless you want to find out whether I can stop him twice.”

“You’re responsible for him now.”

I glance at the blood drying between Orion’s claws. “I gathered that.”

We start walking again with a wide strip of empty gravel behind us. Nobody tries to close it this time. Orion checks the guards twice, keeps pace with me, and edges nearer whenever my breathing catches, the chemical bite of the sedatives following beneath fresh blood. Wolfscorge can drug him, cage him, leave darts buried in his body, and somehow still expects him to react to every new hand like something tame. I understand why he attacked. That doesn’t mean I can let him keep doing it.

I look at the arm the guard grabbed, then at the mess drying across Orion’s claws. “He touched me. He did not attack me.” One ear turns toward me while his attention stays on the men behind us. “You need to learn the difference, because I can’t have you opening somebody every time they grab my arm.”

My house comes into view through the trees, and Orion slows before we reach the porch. I’ve spent three years making the place forgettable: plain siding, narrow steps, nothing outside that gives anyone a reason to linger. Orion studies it like there might be a firing position hidden in the roofline. His attention moves window to window, then to the trees behind the house and back again, checking the same routes until I unlock the door.

I push it open and step aside. “You can come in.”